Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking on stage at AllThingsD’s D10 conference today, and referring to the Sun Microsystems acquisition, openly acknowledged that they wanted it to “do the same thing for the data center that Apple did for the consumer.”

He elaborated that Oracle and Sun wanted to simplify data centers and be the one-stop-shop for companies to buy all the hardware they needed, instead of a host of vendors, each specializing in its own field. “We said, we’ll do all of that. We’ll sell you this one building block,” Ellison said. “In fact it’s the Apple model.”

Ellison went on to reveal that Sun had been an extremely profitable acquisition and already paid for itself. On shrinking revenues in the hardware division, he clarified: The business has dropped maybe 20% in terms of top line but it’s up by a factor of five in terms of profit.”

“Our margins on our hardware business are probably the highest margins of anyone in the server business.”